


Careful Fear and Dead Devotion

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: (probably tagging harsher than it needs but better safe than sorry), Amnesia, Brainwashing, Canon Divergence, Dubious Consent, M/M, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 13:00:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19946569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: Jesse McCree - that's what they tell him his name is - wakes up without his arm and without his memories.At least he has Gabriel to keep him safe.





	Careful Fear and Dead Devotion

**Author's Note:**

> sci declared themself this fic's godparent and who am I to argue  
> let's blame the rest of the server too because why not
> 
> title from [the National's Don't Swallow the Cap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFnA-8H-5lo)  
> written to the soundtrack of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

He blinks open eyes that feel like they’ve been shut for as long as he can remember. He’s not sure if his vision is clear or not - everything is stark, painful white. White with no beginning or end, no unrelieving texture. He wants to turn his head, to see where he is, but it’s strapped down.

He closes his eyes, but opens them immediately when he feels cool fingers on his forehead.

“Jesse? Can you hear me?” The voice is rough, smoky. Low. Familiar and yet not. He - Jesse? Is that who he is? - turns his head as much as he can, only to see a face that’s - wrong. He doesn’t know much but he knows that people aren’t supposed to look like this.

They’re not supposed to have skin that looks like it was faded by the sun and then tanned back into the approximation of human features. They’re not supposed to have teeth that are too long and too white and barely hidden by lips that looked like they could smile, once long ago. They’re not supposed to have eyes, so very many eyes peeking out of places that eyes aren’t supposed to go, lids like scars along the cheekbone, across the nose. 

Jesse - if that is his name - knows that people aren’t supposed to have irises that bore into his own that are the color of emergency lights, of fresh arterial spray, of danger danger danger.

“It’s okay, I promise it’s me, baby.” The cool fingers trace down his temple, across his cheek. “You freaked out about it before, too, before you got used to it. Still me, still yours, I promise.”

“I’m.” The sentence dies in its infancy, in a dry throat and confusion. “Who are you? Who am I?”

Heavy brows draw down, and something in Jesse relaxes at it, at the sight that he’s sure he’s seen a thousand times before, but he still doesn’t know why. “You don’t remember me? Us?” The man looks up, across Jesse at someone he can’t see. “What’s wrong with him.” His tone is flat, deadly, as much accusation as question.

“I told you there were risks.” The voice is smooth, female. Familiar, again, but less so than the man. “The mind is not an exact science.”

The hand that had been on Jesse’s face - the fingers never warmed up, huh - pulls away and moves around just out of Jesse’s sight. Suddenly he can move his head.

“Gabriel, I don’t think -” Jesse can see now that it’s a woman, redheaded, odd eyes, lab coat. She’s familiar but not, like a childhood song heard out of context. 

“He’s awake, that’s good enough,” the man - Gabriel - growls out, and Jesse’s arms are free now. He sits up but - 

But -

Everything is wrong, but this is...this is something else, something so much worse. He turns his left arm over, rotating it back and forth. It’s obeying his commands but it’s not his arm. It’s _not his arm_.

“What the - what the fuck is this, what happened to me?” He can tell his voice is getting high, hysterical, out of all the weirdness it’s this that is one step too far. 

“Jesse, Jesse - look at me. That’s an order, look. At. Me.” Jesse’s eyes, wide and terrified, meet the red gaze that is still somehow more familiar than whatever the fuck his arm is now. “You were in an accident. We were on a mission, it went wrong. Your arm…” The red eyes - all, all of them - close for a minute, and the face that remains is something almost on the tip of Jesse’s tongue. “It was vaporized. There was nothing we could do. Moira designed you a new one - it should move just like an arm, should move just like normal. I don’t know why you’re not remembering but - you’re okay, Jesse. You’re with me, you’re okay.”

Hands are wrapped around his biceps, pricks at the tips of the fingers going through the thin cloth. Jesse looks down and there are - claws, dark and shiny and digging into his arms. “Gabriel, I’m bleeding.”

Gabriel pulls back, hands flexing. Jesse had thought they were gloves but no, they’re his nails. He frowns. “You’ve never called me -” he stops, shakes his head. Looks at the scientist, Moira. “I’m taking him.”

“I don’t believe that is wise.” 

A snarl, something animal, feral. An arm wraps around Jesse and pulls him off the table, claws digging into his ribs. Jesse feels the trickles of blood down his side as he’s hustled through steel hallways. There are people in white and silver and red, who flatten themselves against the walls as they pass.

They’re in a room. Bed, dresser, bathroom off to the side. Desk and uncomfortable looking couch. Steel walls, nothing personal. “Is this...my room?”

Gabriel is right behind him, a cool, looming presence. Comforting, but there’s something in the back of Jesse’s mind that’s still uncomfortable with it.

“Our room.”

“Oh.”

Gabriel gets him undressed with the ease of long practice, doesn’t blink at the slow, coagulating lines down Jesse’s side. “Go shower.”

Jesse goes to the shower on wobbly feet, scrubs himself clean slowly. It only occurs to him some minutes in that perhaps he shouldn’t get the arm wet, but decides that he just doesn’t care. The soap is a familiar smell, citrus and eucalyptus. It doesn’t fit right on his own skin though, it belongs on someone else’s. 

He comes out with a towel wrapped around him to find Gabriel leaning back in bed, clad in something soft and black. He nods at the bed. “There’s some clothing for you.” 

Jesse puts it on - it fits, fits perfectly and is washed to softness but it still isn’t. Isn’t right. He stands awkwardly by the bed until - “Get in.”

He stares at the ceiling flat on his back, in an imitation of how he lay in the hospital bed. He can still feel the straps around him. Gabriel rolls onto his side, his weight making the mattress dip. “What do you remember?”

“Nothing, really. Things feel...like I should know them, but I don’t.” Turning his head, he tries to see past the scars, the strangeness to a man he might share a bed with. “Who am I? Who are - we?”

Gabriel sighs. It smells like metal. “I pulled you out of a gang, when you were barely more than a kid. We worked together, for a long time. In Blackwatch, part of Overwatch. You remember? Oh. Anyways, everything went to shit, and we came here to Talon. Together.” He reaches over and Jesse controls his flinch as the claws come towards his face. They trace through his hair, knowing just how to tease the tangles out. “We’ve been together, for a long, long time. You’re mine, we - we love each other so much, Jesse.” He smiles, and Jesse’s gaze moves from the too white teeth to the too red eyes, and he can see his own face reflected in their surface. 

“We do?”

Gabriel leans forward, catches Jesse’s mouth in a kiss that he relaxes into automatically. The teeth aren’t right but everything else feels like the closest thing to comfort since the start of his very short life. Gabriel turns Jesse over, wraps one arm around his waist and the other over his new, strange arm, pressing it down against his side as his hand rests over Jesse’s heart. He can feel the claws, in a perfect circle around where the muscle is beating fast, so fast.

Cool breath moves over the back of Jesse’s neck. “You’d do anything for me, baby,” he murmurs, all smoke and ash. Lips press against the muscle there, and Jesse can feel the teeth behind them. “And I’d do anything for you. Anything at all.” 

Jesse stares into the darkness until he passes out from exhaustion.

-x-x-x-x-x-

He’s given no time to adjust, to get acclimated. Jesse is told over and over again that this is where he works, where he lives, what he has been doing, and yet. And yet. People everywhere - these supposedly terrifying Talon soldiers - look at him with a combination of confusion and fear, like a wolf who has come in off of the street and is now in their living room.

It’s nothing, of course, compared to how they look at Gabriel.

Gabriel, who wears a mask pale as bone and coat black as ink, who seems to be comfortable with no one but Jesse and Moira and a woman who only ever appears on screens or through microphones, laughing voice and flashes of purple. Gabriel - or Reaper, how he is referred to in hushed tones - is Talon’s boogeyman, their nightmare in the dark.

They look at Gabriel in terror, and at Jesse in awe for being the one to take him home at night. 

He asks, but no one can give him a straight answer as to why he doesn’t remember his life up until he woke up in the medical bay. His - his entire life. Just, gone. Moira shrugs, says that it’s the trauma of losing his arm. Gabriel looks at him with something unreadable on his face and says that he’s here now, and he’s been here, so the past doesn’t matter. Jesse lets it go, he has too much else to deal with.

Jesse dresses in a uniform that goes on as easy as breathing, heavy boots and chest armor and poncho, chaps that are worn soft and buttery and a hat that couldn’t possibly fit anyone but him. And yet the Talon logo belt buckle seems wrong when he runs his fingers over it, the white shirt underneath seems too bright. Like everything else it seems like a life half routine and half off-balance, leaving him constantly unsteady.

The arm is an adjustment, but Gabriel was right - it feels like his own quickly. Like it’s always been there, always been a part of him. It’s not like Jesse knows any different, other than something deep in his self-identity that says _no_ , says _wrong_. 

Jesse tells himself that it’s just the arm.

He goes through his days as Reaper’s partner, fighting next to him, stealing this or that, killing when they need to. His voice in Jesse’s ear when Jesse is waiting in the shadows to make his move is the most comfortable he ever feels, like he’s back home where he belongs. Jesse still isn’t sure who he is, but he knows that the feeling of hot blood on his fingers is a familiar one, knows that his hands can snap a neck before his brain engages, knows that when another man dies under his hands and he looks up and sees Gabriel smiling down at him he feels complete.

Sometimes Gabriel goes off and does things, and he won’t let Jesse come along. “I thought you loved me,” Jesse says, confused. “I thought we were partners.”

Gabriel sighs and holds Jesse’s hips too tight, claws cutting in as Jesse bites back a whimper. “I do love you, which is why I don’t want you to see what I have to do sometimes.”

Jesse runs his fingers through Gabriel’s hair, hair that his brain says is too long even as his hands feel out the scars underneath that the curls are covering up. “I’m either with you or I’m not, darlin’,” he says, the endearment rolling off his tongue without his permission. It softens Gabriel’s face, though, and he lets Jesse come with him the next time.

Lets Jesse see at how easily those claws can draw seams into skin, digging down to show things that were never meant to see daylight, show what nerves look like when they’re pulled free. Lets him see how bones can be removed one by one, how they can be crushed to powder with his hideous strength. Lets him see what happens when the mask comes off and the teeth come out and the Reaper takes his due.

Afterwards Jesse thumbs a bit of blood off of Gabriel’s sharp cheekbone, off of his full lip, when he’s Gabriel again and the madness has left his red, red eyes. “You back with me?” he murmurs, and Gabriel’s kiss tastes like rust and ash. 

Gabriel opens his many eyes and looks at Jesse like he’s a revelation.

-x-x-x-x-x-

That’s the first night that Gabriel takes Jesse to bed. They’ve been sleeping together in the sense that they’re in the same space, where Gabriel wraps himself around Jesse like he’s trying to take him into himself. Sometimes Jesse wakes in the earliest hours of morning to find the arms around him have grown insubstantial, turned from cool flesh into cooler black smoke. The first time it happened Jesse stumbled out of bed, blinking in the dim slivers of security light to see the mass of swirling smoke and flashes of red the same color of Gabriel’s eyes that had been wrapped around him. 

He’d slept on the couch that night, and danced around why until Gabriel got distracted by some bullshit Moira was trying to pull. The next time it happened Jesse just got his breathing under control, and eventually fell asleep after long hours adjusting. He rationalized it as something he obviously had been used to in the past, so it was something he could get used to now. Jesse was still putting together bits of who he was, who he is, but he knows that he is at his core a deeply practical person. He can roll with this, same as everything else.

But that night, that night Gabriel showed Jesse who he was, it starts like normal - cleaning the various bits of this and that off of their uniforms, showering off the blood. After, though, Gabriel doesn’t get dressed. He stands there, letting Jesse look him over, taking in the places he must have been ripped apart before being stitched back together. His body is a roadmap of lines that speak of horror and agony, and Jesse wonders if he was there when they were carved. 

Gabriel pulls him into bed, presses Jesse into the sheets. Shreds his shirt and pants with an ease that makes Jesse think of earlier in the day when it was something thicker and harder to tear under his claws. Jesse touches, like he hasn’t been allowed to before. Gabriel touches too, but leaves behind lines that are white then pink then dripping red. He doesn’t apologize and Jesse doesn’t expect him to.

By unspoken agreement Jesse opens himself up. Gabriel stares, pale tongue swiping along dark lips, and the gouges he’s digging in Jesse’s ass make it clear he wishes he could be doing it himself. He pushes himself in with not enough preparation, eager and unrelenting. Jesse thinks about how he’s only the fifth, eighth, tenth body that Gabriel has been inside today.

Jesse tries to participate but between the teeth at his throat and the claws at his waist he can’t do much other than writhe between the two. He attempts to get a hand on himself but Gabriel snarls and slams it to the bed, thumb pressing hard between the tendons of his wrist. Gabriel is a machine, though, working into Jesse like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. Jesse finally comes with a sob, crying out, “Fuckin' _Christ_ , Gabe,” and Gabriel bites deep into Jesse’s shoulder.

When Gabriel finally comes, long long minutes later, far past the time when Jesse started to squirm from oversensitivity and finally just lay there with pained tears slowly leaking out, Gabriel dissolves. Jesse feels him spurt inside, then feels - nothing and everything, feels himself clench around something that is the farthest thing from human but still somehow pulsing in him. 

Gabriel comes back to himself in pieces - an arm across Jesse’s chest, a hip pressed to Jesse’s thigh, a leg tangled with Jesse’s own. Neither say anything, but once Gabriel is back in one piece he wraps himself around Jesse and licks away the blood drying on his shoulder and laps at it with a rough tongue until it bleeds again.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Time goes on. They fight, kill, fuck, and soon Jesse isn’t sure why he ever felt out of place here. People get used to him, and then they start to look at him with the same expression they have when they look at Reaper. Jesse doesn’t know why, he’s just going along with whatever Gabriel asks of him.

“They’re afraid of me, now,” Jesse says one night in bed, hand stroking through Gabriel’s hair as he nurses at a bite he’s sunk into Jesse’s side. Gabriel’s shoulders roll in a shrug as he scrapes away the coagulated blood with the pointed tip of his tongue so fresh redness can seep through. 

“Don’t know why they should be,” he murmurs into Jesse’s skin. 

Jesse winces as a tooth digs in a bit too deep. “Dunno why they’re afraid of you, either.” Yes, maybe Gabriel is a bit harsh on the battlefield, but that’s just how it goes, sometimes. At home he’s always so soft with Jesse, treating him like something to be cherished, to be worshipped. Gabriel doesn’t answer, though. Just moves down a bit and laughs deep in his throat when he bites too hard and a tooth scrapes on Jesse’s hipbone. Jesse swats at his head gently, but settles his hand back into Gabriel’s hair as he breathes through the pain, internalizes it.

It’s normal for them, something Jesse was at first wary of but Gabriel told him that this was what they did, what they’d always done together. They have black sheets for a reason, he says.

A few days later, something odd happens. They’re in Egypt, doing a little of this and a little of that. Jesse doesn’t pay attention much to orders, Gabriel is always there to tell him where to go and what to do. This time, though, Gabriel takes him aside, tells him that he’s going to do something alone.

“It’s fine, I promise, baby,” he says with his claws gentle on Jesse’s cheekbones. “It’s nothing bad, it’ll just be faster if I’m in and out on my own.” Jesse nods, kisses his bone mask’s forehead and goes to help with raiding a weapons cache. He sees Gabriel meet with a few people before walking off, but it’s fine, he’s probably just giving orders. 

That evening Gabriel returns with a limp and without his mask. There’s a pulse fire wound to his thigh that’s nearly hidden by black fabric but it’s slowly leaking. Gabriel heals everything so fast, Jesse has never seen him with a wound lasting more than a few minutes. He helps Gabriel unwrap the makeshift black fabric mask and gets him in bed. Gabriel curls up and falls asleep on the cot, faster and deeper than he ever normally does in public. Jesse gently moves his jaw to get his teeth out of Jesse’s bicep, then dresses quietly in his uniform and slips out of the temporary Talon hideout.

Jesse still is missing a great deal about himself, but some things he just _knows_ that he knows. He can track someone across unfamiliar territory with just a few drops of blood or a scuffed print to follow. He’s aware of how Gabriel moves and when he takes the high ground and when he sticks to alleyways. And most importantly, Jesse knows how to move without being seen himself, how to melt into the shadows and slide from hiding place to hiding place.

He tracks Gabriel back to outside of a compound, where there’s the evidence of many, many bodies that are now gone. Inside he finds Gabriel’s shotgun shell casings, along with some odd darts of different colors. He picks one up, turns it over. He knows it, he can picture the gun that fires them but - it fuzzes out in his brain after that. He tracks the owner of the darts and, presumably, the pulse weapon that hit Gabriel. There are two sets of prints, one about Jesse’s size, one smaller and narrower. 

Jesse follows them through a maze of pathways, eventually seeing droplets of blood joining the tracks. He eventually finds a small apartment, carved out of an ancient stone building. Jesse stays in the shadows, moving closer and closer until he can hear voices. One male, one female. Both - he knows. Somehow, he knows them.

He listens to them talk, mentioning familiar names - Amélie, Ziegler, Fareeha. He hears his own name once, Gabriel’s several times. The people call each other Ana and Jack, but something in the back of Jesse’s mind tells him no, that’s not what he calls them. That’s who they are, and yet. And yet. 

At the end, the woman, Ana says to Jack, “Do you think he knows, yet?” 

Jack sighs. “Do you think he wants to know? Gabe has what he wants, and Jesse is going to be the last person to complain about it.”

A long pause, before Ana speaks. “If Jesse was himself, he’d be the first to complain. You know that. After what he went through, being able to control himself -”

“I know.”

Silence, for a while, apart from the sipping of tea. Ana clears her throat. “You know that bringing him in would be the easiest way of getting to Gabriel. He wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

Jesse can’t help himself - he gets up on his tiptoes, peers in through a crack revealed by crumbling mortar. He sees an old man, white hair but a hard body, covered in stitches that makes him look for a moment like a photo negative of Gabriel. He scrubs his hands through his hair, passes one over his face, although his back is to Jesse so he can’t see the expression. “I know. But turning him into a pawn -”

His foot slips, and Jesse stumbles back into the alley. “Did you hear something?” says Ana’s voice, and Jesse doesn’t stick around to hear the response. He flees into the warm Cairo night, not stopping his desperate run until he’s a block away from the Talon hideout.

Jesse doesn’t know what he heard, but he knows that none of it is good for Gabriel. Or, presumably, him.

He undresses after getting past the guards, carefully gets into bed and fits himself back into Gabriel’s arms. Gabriel tightens his grip, digs his claws in. Jesse relaxes into the sheets at the familiar trickle of warm blood, and drifts off into a troubled sleep. He’s not going to say anything to Gabriel, he wouldn’t want to worry him, but he’s going to keep an ear out.

Gabriel is his world. Jesse can’t let anything disrupt that.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Nothing seems to come from the events in Cairo - Gabriel heals, and Jesse keeps what he saw to himself. He knows that he should tell Gabriel, he tells Gabriel everything, but this one time it’s just easier to keep his mouth shut. Gabriel seems touchy about whatever happened in the compound, and Jesse doesn’t want to upset him further.

Jesse meets Sombra, finally. She apparently is some kind of contractor for Talon - rarely on base, and the work she does for them is usually remote. She treats Gabriel unlike anyone else does, calling him _Gabi_ and making fun of him in a way that says she has no fear of what he could do to her. It makes Jesse bristle despite himself, this relationship that he doesn’t know how it started, doesn’t know what’s part of it.

Sombra notices because she seems to notice everything. She and Jesse seemed to have been close, though - she ruffles his hair and calls him _papi chulo_ and brings him saladitos which he has no recollection of ever eating before, but melt in his mouth like memories he can almost touch. He learns to be quiet with her in a way that he normally can’t be with anyone but Gabriel. Sombra tucks herself into a corner of the couch with her ever present tablets and settles into a ball of human static - buzzing like soft white noise.

At the end of Sombra’s stint at Talon headquarters, she takes Jesse aside. She fidgets, tucking her hair behind an ear and glancing around before handing Jesse a memory stick. “I thought you should see this,” she says. “Maybe it could help.”

He frowns. “What is it?”

“It’s you.”

At Jesse’s confused look, she sighs and folds her arms. “It’s you, before. Your choice as to whether you look at it or not, but. You should have the option.”

She vanishes in that eerie way she has, and Jesse is left with a small, innocuous looking black memory stick in his hands. 

He doesn’t intend to look at it, and certainly not that night, but Gabriel has a meeting with Doomfist and Jesse feels like he’s rattling around the empty steel bedroom. He finally tucks himself into a corner of the bed - Gabriel’s side, so he can surround himself with the iron and spice tang of him - and plugs in the stick.

It’s - video. Surveillance footage, mostly, cobbled together hastily into a single file. Jesse sees himself - but not himself. This Jesse stands tall, wears spurs that clink, laughs loudly and grins freely. He touches everyone - especially a man that’s half metal and a younger woman with gold beads in her dark hair. But most of all, he touches Gabriel.

Gabriel who has warm dark skin and buzzed short hair and a hat that looks like it belongs on a longshoreman, who frowns most of the time but smiles when he looks at Jesse. Who moves with grace, instead of slithering. Who commands respect from seemingly everyone that talks to him. Who touches Jesse’s face with blunt, clawless fingers when no one else is looking.

Jesse sits in the bed and watches and cries. 

He doesn’t know why, exactly. It’s like looking at strangers. There’s nothing that says how they got to where they are now, how Gabriel and Jesse became the people that now exist in black and red and white, in smoke and blood and bone.

The last clip in the file is silent, the sound having cut out. Jesse sees himself talk to Jack - he recognizes the body language of the man he’d seen those many weeks ago and puts a name to the face. They shake hands, Jack claps him on the shoulder. Jesse then goes to Gabriel and they argue. Jesse sees his own mouth yell _Gabe I have to_ and _Gabe I love you_ in silent shouts, sees Gabriel’s back stiffen and then slump. Sees himself discard his armor in the middle of the floor and wrap something red and gold around his shoulders before striding down a gangplank and leaving Gabriel alone.

Jesse takes the memory stick out and crushes it down to so much plastic and silicon debris in his metal fist. He flushes the crumpled bits down the toilet and curls up in bed with the lights off, staring at where he knows the wall is. 

When Gabriel comes in, he slides his cool arms around Jesse and murmurs how much he loves him in his ear, like he does every night.

Jesse isn’t sure what he saw in the video, isn’t sure what Sombra meant him to get out of it. He does know now that Gabriel has always loved him. 

That Gabriel loves him now and then and always, always will.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Jesse finds home.

With Gabriel, with Talon, with what they do. He wonders, sometimes, why Gabriel seems so determined to take down the organization that both he and Jesse belonged to for so long. He feels like he should know, that if he had some of those memories from before he could pinpoint it. At the same time, it doesn’t matter now. He has his job, he has Gabriel. That’s enough.

Gabriel has been getting more and more frustrated - there was a former colleague that refused to join them, apparently Overwatch has reunited and is causing trouble everywhere, Talon is getting bad press and their recruitment numbers are down. Jesse tries to make things better, lets Gabriel do what he needs to his body in order to calm down, to revitalize himself. He borrows a portable biotic unit from Moira, heals the damage enough so Jesse can sleep easily, so he can be whole in the morning.

Jesse just hums to himself and strokes through Gabriel’s hair and enjoys Gabriel being in him, however he can get it.

It’s been months of tension slowly building, of Talon seeming to hold its breath. It finally coalesces in a showdown in Iceland, Talon emptying its headquarters to go up against the reformed Overwatch, everyone fighting over a facility that had secretly been putting together Titans.

It’s chaos on the battlefield, Jesse and Gabriel and everyone else on their team getting separated from one another immediately. Jesse fires his gun until there’s nothing left, until he has to pull out a smaller pulse pistol. He shoots at a person covered in silver and green armor, who somehow manages to deflect the blast.

“McCree! _McCree!_ ” the faceless person calls, and Jesse hesitates. He doesn’t recognize the armor at all but the voice - 

Before he can do or say anything Sombra is at his side with an enormous gun in one hand and a tablet in the other, her hair in uncharacteristic disarray, yelling in his ear that Gabriel wants to meet him at the west side of the facility.

Jesse nods and turns his back on the armored figure, snatching an abandoned hovercycle off the ground to get him there faster. He zooms around, dodging weapons fire and bodies, eventually dumping the cycle behind a pile or corpses where he can get it later. 

He paces silently along the edges, looking for red helmets or black smoke. Instead, he rounds a corner and sees a figure with a black mask that flashes blue lines for just a split second, before there’s a sting at the side of his neck and everything goes dark.

-x-x-x-x-x-

He blinks his eyes open to see a ceiling, white and featureless. Second verse, same as the first. At least this time he can remember who he is. 

Blue eyes and blonde hair appear above him. “How are you doing, Jesse? You feeling all right?”

Jesse frowns up at the woman that he almost knows the name of. He tries to get up, but he’s restrained. 

“I’m sorry about that,” she says with what seems like genuine apology in her voice. “The first few times you woke up you were...not quite all there.”

“He still isn’t,” a voice says, raspy and rough like a glacier grinding down a valley. A heavily scarred face appears on the other side from the doctor, frowning and mouth downturned. “You know who I am?”

Jack, it’s Jack, but that’s not - that’s not what Jesse calls him - “Morrison,” he says finally, dredging the name out of the back of his brain kicking and screaming. 

“He remembers you,” the blonde doctor says.

“No, I don’t think he does,” Jack replies, still glowering down at Jesse. “Sedate him.”

“Commander -”

“Don’t call me that, and he’s still a risk. Sedate him or I shoot him with Ana’s gun.”

The doctor sighs, reaches up and adjusts something. Jesse feels warm, and then feels nothing at all.

-x-x-x-x-x-

They wake him up for real some time later, Jesse has no idea how long. They put him in a chair, still strapped down. Jack and Ana talk to him, telling him what happened after Sombra’s video cut out. How Jesse had left Blackwatch after it crumbled, how Gabriel - _Gabe_ , they call him, like that’s something Jesse should know - had roamed the halls like a vengeful ghost in his abscence. How Jack and Gabriel had fought, coming to blows over something that Jack still won’t articulate clearly. How they don’t know how or why or who, but headquarters - _the only home Jesse had ever truly had_ , they say, like the past few years haven’t existed - had blown into smithereens.

Then, they know less. Glancing at each other to check dates, Ana pulling out a tablet at one point. Jesse had gone back to America, back to where he’d been born. He slipped back into his old ways - train robbery, weapons trafficking. He didn’t kill though, and it was keeping himself clean of blood that kept him under the radar.

Gabriel surfaced eventually, like Jack did, like Ana did. While those two went became solo vigilantes, though, Gabriel ended up in Talon. They think that Moira had a hand in what he became, why he ended up with them, Ana says. They’re not sure, though.

After a few years, though...something happened. Something in Australia. No one knows why Jesse was there, no one knows why Gabriel was either. But the Junkers got involved, and when the Junkers are involved there is fire and mayhem to follow. The next thing anyone knew, Jesse was gone.

And then he wasn’t.

And then he was with Gabriel.

Ana holds his loose hand with cool fingers that warm up quickly. “It’s okay, we rescued you,” she says earnestly. “You’re out of Talon, you’re safe now.”

Jesse doesn’t say anything, just hesitantly nods. Jack continues to frown. 

They unstrap him, put him in a room that locks from the outside. “Some of your old things are here,” Jack says abruptly. “You kept a storage locker offsite that you never emptied, and in the chaos everyone forgot about it. It’s in boxes, but it’s yours.”

There’s a clank as the lock engages, and Jesse is alone. He takes the lid off of a box - it’s all books, cushioned at the top by a thick woollen cloth with a pattern woven in to it. He lifts it to set it aside and pauses. It smells like spice, like gun oil, like citrus and tobacco. It smells like...like...like what Jesse wished he smelled like.

A box of knicknacks, shot glasses from here and there, little wooden carvings made with more enthusiasm than skill. Ashtrays, a dozen or more from as many countries that are useless to him. 

Jesse doesn’t smoke.

It’s all part and parcel of someone that existed, but no one that Jesse knows. He tosses and turns that night, unable to fall asleep without arms weighing him down and the jab of claws in his skin. Eventually he gets up, grabs the woollen cloth - _serape_ , his hindbrain offers - and wraps it around himself.

He falls asleep in minutes.

-x-x-x-x-x-

Everyone tiptoes around him, but they talk to him all the same. Faces from his past, saying do you remember this, do you remember that. It does come back, some bits and pieces. He eats sausage that Reinhardt prepares and can suddenly recall Gabe trying to light a grill and succeeding only in burning his eyebrows off, before Jack took over with a roll of his eyes and a knowledgeable hand. Fareeha hugs him and Jesse remembers how to braid hair, Genji tosses him a shuriken and he remembers he can use a crossbow.

It’s not all of it, not even close. Thirty some years may be permanently out of Jesse’s reach but - it’s something. 

They give Jesse more and more freedom, bit by bit. Jesse doesn’t say much, doesn’t talk at all, really. He follows Genji around quite a bit - he’s a touchstone that Jesse can almost, almost grasp.

He sits up on the roof with Genji, who feels comfortable with him enough to take his mask off. Genji gets him, more than most anyone else. Perhaps it was being in Blackwatch together, perhaps it was whatever made his body into something that needs a full coating of armor. Jesse’s sure he knew why that was at some point, but not anymore.

Genji understands anger.

“Do you miss it?” he asks. 

Jesse gives it some thought, because he thinks that Genji might understand. But he can’t explain it, can’t begin to talk about how he had rebuilt himself and now it was gone, gone with nothing left to hold him up but the shattered wooden frame of what had once been a person. A stranger.

“Sometimes,” he says. 

-x-x-x-x-x-

The interrogations start, but they’re too polite to call them that. They just start to ask, bit by bit - what was it like, in Talon? What were the facilities like? How many people? 

Then the specifics - what could Gabriel do? Did anyone ever tell him why he was like that, now? Was it Moira? Did he eat normally, sleep normally?

Jesse is either quiet or deflects. Jack doesn’t care and just wants to be able to go on the attack, but Ana can tell that his emotions aren’t easily sorted out. 

“He killed your friends, Jesse,” she says finally. “Even if you don’t remember them. He - he tortured them and killed them and we don’t know why.” Jesse is silent.

They have him go out on missions - small and easily controllable. Always accompanied by someone he used to know. Nothing involving too much violence, nothing involving Talon.

It comes to a head, though. You can’t suckle at the teat for too long without it eventually coming due.

“We’re going to raid a Talon facility, and we have too many people on the injured list,” Jack says bluntly. He doesn’t trust Jesse, likely never will. From what he can tell Jesse got along decently well with him back in the day, but he was always Gabriel’s first. Jesse doesn’t know if it’s that or his time in Talon or something else, but Jack will never be comfortable with him. “We need you,” he continues. “Are you going to be able to handle it?”

Jesse nods, hesitantly. He’d never been close to anyone other than Gabriel or Sombra, so one set of bodies to kill is as good as another, he doesn’t particularly care if they’re wearing blue and yellow or red helmets.

Jack is clearly not happy, but just as clearly stuck. He traps Jesse in a conference room for hours, dragging bits of information about Talon troop movements out of him. Jesse gives it up, eventually. He honestly doesn’t care much.

The Talon base isn’t one that Jesse is familiar with - drab buildings in a desert canyon far from any kind of civilization. He tells Ana what the security might be: he’s been away for long enough that it might have changed, but he’s gotten to know these Overwatch people enough that he doesn’t want them to die right away. The Jesse he used to be would have wanted them to live, at least.

Jesse is on lookout, on top of a three story building with the best view around. Jack had flatly refused to put him in the middle of the fighting, and Ana had agreed. There’s the sound of pulse fire echoing around the area, sound bouncing off of the canyon walls in the distance. Genji is up there with him, crouching at the corner like some futuristic gargoyle. 

Standing on the edge of the building, Jesse looks out over the desert, shading his eyes. There’s almost no fighting here, so he looks out without fear.

“Jesse, I don’t think you should -”

Genji is cut off by a sound, an inhuman roar of noise and thunder that hits them like a physical blow. Jesse’s head snaps to the side, sees a black streak of smoke rocketing towards him, towards where Jesse is clearly outlined against the setting sun.

“Jesse? McCree! McCr -”

Jesse can’t hear Genji’s voice anymore, can’t hear the sound of the fighting in the distance. All he can hear is the rush of wind past his ears as he flings himself off the side of the building, eyes closed, arms wide, and with a beatific grin on his face.

He knows that he’ll never hit the ground because Gabriel is there, Gabriel is there to catch him.

Gabriel will always, always be there for him. 

Gabriel loves him.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading friends, come yell at me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thereweregiants)


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